The Local Marketing Stack

Email Analytics

Zone 2 • Difficulty: • Free Options Available

One of the many advantages to using an Email Service Provider for your email marketing (as opposed to just sending them from your personal email account) is the analytics that ESP’s provide you as part of your subscription.

Metrics include:

• Open rate
  How many people opened your email? Tracking this metric over time can help you identify the best days and times to send your emails, as well as the most compelling keywords or calls-to-action to use in your subject lines.
• Clickthroughs
  Once they opened, how many subscribers (and which subscribers) clicked through to the content you were promoting? Analyzing this information can help you segment your audience by content type and optimize the content you deliver to each segment.
• Bounce rate
  How many addresses are no longer in use? Back to the three C’s of email marketing, list cleanliness is one of the keys to success.

  Beyond that, tracking down subscribers who may have left their previous company can often help you initiate two new relationships–one with a new person at the previous company, and one with the previous subscriber at their new company!

• Unsubscribes/complaints
  It may seem counterintuitive, but a handful of unsubscribes per email is probably a good thing. It helps you keep your list targeted to people who are interested in your content, and it helps cut down on spam complaints, which are silent killers of email deliverability over time.